Slovene Home Guard

The Slovene Home Guard (Slovene: Slovensko domobranstvo; German: Slowenische Landeswehr) was a Slovene military anti-Partisan organization during the 1943-1945 German occupation of the formerly Italian-occupied Province of Ljubljana. It consisted of former Village Sentries (In Slovene: "Vaške straže", in Italian language: "Guardia Civica"), part of Italian-sponsored Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia, re-organized under Nazi command after Italy dropped out of the war.

It was closely linked to Slovenian right wing anti-Communist political parties and organizations, which provided most of the membership, taking assistance of Germans rather than the opposite. In the Slovenian Littoral, a similar but much smaller unit, called Slovenian National Defense Corps (Slovene: Slovensko narodno varnostni zbor, German: Slowenisches Nationales Schutzkorps), more commonly known as the Littoral Home Guard (Slovene: Primorsko domobranstvo) was ideologically and organizationally linked to the SD. An even smaller Upper Carniolan Self-Defense (Slovene: Gorenjska samozaščita, German: Oberkrainer Landschutz), also known as the Upper Carniolan Home Guard (Slovene: Gorenjsko domobranstvo) was active in the Upper Carniola between 1944 and 1945. All three "home guard" units were formed almost exclusively by ethnic Slovenes. At their peak, they had a combined membership of around 21,000 men, of whom 15,000 in the Province of Ljubljana, 3,500 in the Julian March and 2,500 in the Upper Carniola. Its officers and language of command were Slovene.

Home Guard

Home Guard is a title given to various military organizations at various times, with the implication of an emergency or reserve force raised for local defense.

The term "Home Guard" was first officially used in the American Civil War, starting with units formed by German immigrants in Missouri, and may derive from possible historic use of the term Heimwehr ("home guard") to describe units officially known as Landwehr ("country guard"), or from an attempted translation of landwehr.

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